


The Frozen Boy

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, Golden Age, book canon means nothing to me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 08:09:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19786798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "No specifications on plot per say, but I’d love to see someone explore the concept of Pitch having lost his son (rather than daughter), hence the burning need to have Jack by his side.+Pitch notices physical similarities between Jack an his son (ex: eye color, the shape of his smile, the sound of his voice)"It’s been too long since I blamed the moon for something! Pitch’s son was turned into Nightlight to defend the Lunanoff baby after Kozmotis became Pitch. This ended badly, to say the least. When Pitch meets Jack he knows he can’t let the story go untold any longer.





	The Frozen Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 4/13/2016.

Pitch stared down at the spirit with the Guardians. A sharp spike of shock threatened to pin him as he was, eyes wide and mouth fallen open. Was this some cruel effect of the Tooth Palace? Had handling so many stolen memories warped his perception of the present somehow? What was he seeing? _Who_ was he seeing? He couldn’t be—Pitch knew what had happened to him, Pitch knew it all too well. The memory flooded through him like poison, one of the few regrets of a being who had slaughtered stars.  
  
He knew. He knew who it couldn’t be, and why, exactly why.  
  
But who was it? Who? Pitch wracked his brains, trying to think of every spirit he’d met or heard described. Finally, fragment by fragment, the answer came. “Jack Frost,” he said aloud, with relief he didn’t care if the others heard. “I didn’t know you were such close friends with the Guardians!” Truthfully, he didn’t know much of anything pertaining to Jack Frost, and why he looked—why he seemed—he couldn’t think of any of that now. He needed to state his grievance and make a clear escape.  
  
He couldn’t unravel what was happening and defend himself at the same time.  
  
And with Jack there, he might not be able to defend himself at all.  
  


* * *

  
  
Pitch paced back and forth in his caverns, ignoring the flickering from the globe, ignoring the nightmares, ignoring the chittering of the tooth fairies in their cages. Jack Frost. If he had been with the Guardians, he wasn’t really a neutral party, though Pitch had taunted him so. The Guardians wouldn’t bring neutral parties against Pitch; they thought he was too dangerous. So if Jack was with them, it could only be because he was a Guardian, too, or about to be one.  
  
And that meant he had been chosen by the moon. No, not the moon. The Man in the Moon. Chosen and changed by the Man in the Moon. Pitch clenched his fists. Changed indeed. Human boys did not have skin so pale, hair so white, or eyes so brightly blue. Human boys did not look like…like Nightlight had. Pitch stopped his pacing and pressed his forehead against the cool stone, willing his nausea away.  
  
If the Man in the Moon had changed Jack to look like Nightlight, to do so in order to fight Pitch, Pitch needed to be able to think about what the Man in the Moon was trying to do. He could not think Pitch would…his plan had failed with Nightlight…Nightlight had not stopped…he could not know of Pitch’s regrets.  
  
Pitch forced himself to breathe slowly. What did the Man in the Moon know of what had happened? There had been recordings of his last moments as Kozmotis Pitchiner. The fearlings’ screams and pleas in his son’s voice no doubt had only been in his mind. But he had told him he would come for him. He had cried out for his son by name, before he had opened the doors and the rotting heart of the Golden Age had poured into his own. Before he learned that his son was not there—of course his son was not in the rotting heart, he knew his son was good—before he learned that while some of the prisoners in the vast labyrinth of that prison were there justly, there were billions, _billions_ , that were not.  
  
Kozmotis Pitchiner had faced free, strong fearlings at the dark galactic edge, where no convenient doorway limited the angle of their attacks. The imprisoned, weakened hoard would have fallen like insects before him without those billions of other voices confirming so many of the chatterings and whisperings the fearlings assaulted him with, blunt knives chopping away at the Golden Age in his mind.  
  
How had the Tsar Lunar interpreted it when he dropped his sword and let the shadows take him with their alien power?  
  
Pitch shuddered. He did not want to know the Tsar’s mind. Knowing what had happened was more important.  
  
The Tsar had recruited his son to become a royal guard after his wife died. Pitch was not clear on how either came to pass. In those years he had been lost in vengeance for those who had not been able to crawl under his skin and leave the prison with him.  
  
And his son—his son! They took away his voice, and they took away his name, and bleached the warm color of his skin, and took every drop of ink from his hair. They gave him power, but they froze him, too.  
  
When Pitch’s revenge finally led him to the palace of the Tsar Lunar, it had been decades since he had opened the door. And there, protecting the baby Lunanoff, was his son, holding a spear of light, so strange and changed, and still a boy.  
  
And Pitch had hesitated, of course he had. But then he fought to win because— _when I grow up daddy I’m going to—when I’m big I’m going to—dad I’m going to be_ —because by the blazing stars what had they done WHAT HAD THEY DONE.  
  
And he had won, and that was all he could do, then. He could not raise his sword again, not even for the purpose the fearlings goaded him to.  
  
And he had left, curled in around himself as if the Nightlight they had made of his son had struck home with his diamond spear. But there had never been any wound on his body, that day.  
  
He had left and buried himself in the earth for millennia upon millennia, until the Golden Age was finally gone, or so he thought. Until there were enough minds on this planet to shape him into something new, something with a different purpose, something that could live off their fear and do his poor best to guide them.  
  
And then the Man in the Moon spoke, the baby Lunanoff no longer a baby—how dare he grow!—and chose the Guardians. He had seen what Pitch was doing and thought he could do better. Do cleaner. Without any nasty darkness.  
  
And where would it go, then? Matter and energy, darkness and light. A universe must have both. But the Lunanoffs had always been very persuasive, and generous with power, and Pitch had known he must hide from all of them as long as he could stand to.  
  
And now. Now he stretched forth over the world for the first time in centuries, to show he must not be forgotten, and the Man in the Moon showed him Jack Frost.  
  
Did the Man in the Moon mean to taunt Pitch this way? Did he think to remind him of an earlier defeat? Which he did, of course he did, but not in the way the Man in the Moon knew.  
  
This would not stand. He would not have it. He would take Jack and find a way to fix him or at least free him. He would do what he had failed to do before, as nemesis of the Golden Age. And he would tell the Guardians.  
  
But who could understand the Golden Age as he knew it? Who knew the history? And how would he manage to make them sit still enough to see his memories?  
  
Ah. Of course.  
  
Pitch called some black sand to his hand and a tiny, round figure soon appeared above his palm.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> the-ink-kettle said: I am deeply curious on what Pitch plans to do next.


End file.
